Virtual Home Buying

In this episode of “Russell Realty Minute Podcast,” Evan Russell, owner of the Russell Realty Group, talks about buying a home through the virtual world. He discusses the statistics between viewing a house online and in person and what really matters when it comes to selling a home.

“It’s really all about the price.” – Evan Russell [03:18]

What You Will Learn:
[00:00] Intro
[00:16] Buying a home virtually
[01:35] Not all real estate sites host virtual tours
[02:09] Number of homes viewed online vs in person
[03:35] Outro

Resources:
Visit our website: https://www.therussellteam.com/

VIRTUAL HOME BUYING

Welcome to another episode of Russell realty minute with your host Evan Russell. Where Evan shares his real-world real estate experience with you, if you like what you hear, please be sure to give them a quick review right here in iTunes. Thank you for listening.

A new way to shop for homes in a virtual world, or is it? Are people really buying homes sight unseen? Are they really doing a zoom call to walk to a house and committing five hundred thousand dollars to buy that property? I don’t really think that’s happening. A survey from NAR, the national association of realtors, I’ll read you two quick statistics.

Between photos, detailed information, floor plans, virtual tours, interactive maps, videos, virtual open houses, and virtual listing appointments, the one that had the least amount, this is a survey that what buyers found useful. The bottom, or second to the bottom, were virtual open houses, which were 33 percent didn’t use or not available, 14 percent not useful.

Videos were 47 percent useful, interactive maps, virtual tours, floor plans were 67, detailed information were 86, but it really boils back down to the original tried and true method of marketing a home, which is the pictures. In the best possible light, the most amount of pictures possible. So the 2020 digital home search survey that NAR conducted indicated that photos and detailed information on the MLS are still the most useful pieces of information.

And why that is, is because that’s the only information that syndicates to all the sources. As a real estate agent, I can create a virtual tour, but not every site will host my virtual tour. For example, you can’t see my virtual tour on Zillow; you can’t see it on Realtor; you can’t see it on many other sites.

A couple you can, Redfin you can see them. Interactive maps, 3d floor plans, matter port 3d videos, those are great, but there’s nowhere for them to be displayed. So unless you go directly to your properties website, 123mainstreet.com, to see the virtual tour or the interactive map, those features basically go unnoticed or unused or not easily available for the consumer.

So the second piece of statistics that I think I find interesting is all buyers, the numbers of homes they viewed online, versus how many they viewed in person. So for 2020, the average buyer walked through nine homes; they saw nine of them online. So in the northeast here, the number’s a little different. They went through eight homes before they picked one.

So they looked at eight pieces of property in person before they picked one; they only looked at four online. So let’s assume they didn’t buy one of the ones online, or if they looked at four online, they went out, and they saw it in person, and then they added four to the list. So it doesn’t differentiate between I saw four online, and then I saw eight different ones for a total of 12.

Or did I see four online, and then went to see those four in person, and then added four to the list that I didn’t see online. So kind of a cool statistic to say yes, in a virtual world, zoom calls, and virtual walk-throughs and floor plans and all that sort of stuff is really the way people buy homes, but really it’s not. Really, it’s the same old photos, it’s the same old listing information sheet, which is the MLS.

That’s really what’s bringing buyers to the home. And as we talked about our previous episodes, it’s really all about the price. Do you see the price to value? Does the home make sense for the price it’s listed at? Do the pictures look good? If it is, you’re going to make the trip. All the rest the electronic stuff is basically just noise, and NAR kind of prove that with their survey and their statistics here.